Not One For Sentiment
by Emina Mustafina
Summary: Tony Stark knows how everything works except people. [Set during Iron Man 1 and goes to Iron Man 3 eventually].
1. I

Not One For Sentiment:

The obituary reads "the untimely death of Victoria Parks". She hates that word-untimely. Her mother had cancer for two years. Her mother knew it was coming. Her mother wasn't a woman who ignored the elephant in the room-she knew it was going to cut her life short. She was the one suffering and in an unbearable amount of physical pain, yet she was more prepared for her death than Erica was.

What is untimely, however, is the adoption process. Looking back, her mother must have told Tony that he had a child that would soon be in his care before she passed away because the next thing she knows is that a nice red-haired lady is taking her to a new home. She likes the lady-she dresses nice and has pointy-shoes that make sounds when she walks. She remembers that much of her first meeting with Pepper, yet she can barley remember meeting Tony. She figures that accurately sums up their whole relationship.

Rebecca doesn't look at Tony or Pepper once during the funeral. It's a sad little funeral-one of her mother's co-workers and a somewhat friendly neighbor. She's only met those two on a few occasions, but she takes comfort in their presence compared to the two complete and utter strangers standing to her left.

She's only seven years old when it happens.

xxx

She feels like a paper doll in a glass house that can't escape at times. The Stark Residence is gigantic-it's almost too big for Tony himself. Tony and Erica don't see much of each other during her first month living with Tony. Half of the time he's locked away in his garage so JARVIS keeps her company. Tony brings her down into his garage eventually, but she runs back upstairs into Pepper's arms. Tony looks back at his assistant helplessly like he's out of ideas. Pepper tries to keep her company, but the attempts are in vain. Once autumn begins, she's shipped off to boarding school the following month. It feels too spacious, too prestigious, and too lonely, but Erica figures it's better than living at the mansion.

She doesn't receive calls from Tony. She'll get an occasional "hey" shouted from across the room when Pepper's calling her. All the "love yous" are as forced on his part as they are on her part. It doesn't help that Pepper dotes and worries constantly and says Tony worries as well, but Erica knows it's a lie. When Erica is ten years old, she tells Pepper to stop lying for Tony.

xxx

Their relationship continues on a steady path towards forged sentiment. The calls become less frequent, the pointless texts increase, and each time they take more and more effort to answer. Erica's perfectly fine with staying at school. She takes solace in her pens, and paper, and books. She has her own room, which is good, but can get lonely at times. She has a few friends, not many, but they're good ones. She finds that most of the time she rather stay in her room than go to the rec center or cafeteria. She misses Pepper at times, she admits. When she goes home for summer she's relived to see Pepper in the car and feels horrible when she realizes she's happy her father is not in the car with her. Tony's her father, but she feels like he's the estranged, assistant instead of her biological father.

She never relies on Tony. Pepper's reliable-she's the most organized and headstrong woman Erica's ever met, yet she doesn't rely on her _that way. _She doesn't reply on her emotional support. She tries to convince herself that her borderline coldness towards Pepper is because of her fear that she will replace her mother, but Pepper doesn't want to replace her mother. She's afraid that deep down, she truly does want Pepper to replace her mother.

Her mother's death taught her to grow up. She learned how to take care of herself and accept things. Her mother wasn't coming back and her relationship with her father wasn't going to miraculously repair itself.

It wasn't really ever broken. She never had one to begin with.

xxx

It hurts her to think that the tabloids know more about her father's day-to-day life than she does.

Erica finds out about her father's womanizing habits through an online tabloid. She's thirteen so she's not entirely clueless, especially growing up in a dorm full of girls. She can't blame her roommate Alice for calling her father a womanizer because she didn't know that Tony was her father and secondly, she was right.

She appreciates Pepper more after that. She sees her father with new women on his arm every night, going to Playboy sponsored parties, yet Pepper's been his assistant for years. Pepper's a constant and Rebecca doesn't think that's going to change anytime soon.

xxx

Rebecca stops breathing when she hears about the abduction. Her palms begin to sweat and se makes a dash for the bathroom, dropping the phone on the marble floor as she slams the door behind her. She is able to hastily push back her father as she dry-heaves into the toilet.

"Erica! Erica-" she can hear Pepper calling from the phone. She reaches behind her, desperately feeling for the phone in fear that if she pries her head from the toilet she'll lose control of the bile she's holding back.

"Pe-"

"Happy's coming to get you right now. Uncle Rhodey will find him, alright?" Pepper's voice cracks at the end of the shaky, breathless sentence that's in a tone of voice laced with worry that Erica's never heard Pepper use. And that's when Erica loses control of the contents of her stomach she was holding back.

After receiving the news, she returns home a month early just before summer vacation begins. The mansion feels even more empty when he's gone. She watches the news reports like Tony's a stranger-like he's just Tony Stark, head of Stark Industries. It's a tragic case in a tragic war, but nothing special. It's just another incident except this incident has to share half her chromosomes. When tragedies like this hit close to home, you're supposed to feel changed, but all she feels is numb.

But by the fourth week, Erica cries herself to sleep for the first time since her mother passed away. She doesn't understand why she's so heartbroken over a man who she barley knows, yet she can't help but crying. Pepper must have heard her because the next thing she knows Pepper's hand is on her shoulder. She looks up at her father's assistant-no, she's more than that-and shakes her head. She hastily wipes her tears with the end of her hoodie when she notices that Pepper has tears in the rims of her eyes. Her eyes are even more bloodshot than Erica's-she's been crying since Rebecca felt asleep.

Erica doesn't cry anymore after that night. She promises herself she won't cry anymore-to be strong. To be strong for Pepper. There's a nagging sensation locked away in her mind that she's been acting _too_ strong. Like she doesn't care that her father's missing and most likely long dead like every other soldier that fell victim to the senseless violence, but that's not true. She realizes that she'd always cared about her father, but neither of them knew how to properly express it. When it finally hits her, she cries for the second time in a year. In the back of her mind, she wishes Pepper would hear her and come into her bedroom to comfort her and hold her again, but Pepper never comes.

She finally musters the courage to go back to Boston to visit her mother's grave and crumbles. She cries for an hour until her throat is raw and her eyes won't stop watering as she walks to the cemetery's gates. She pretends that none of her anguish was for Tony.

xxx

"I should have done more to protect him, Erica. I..." Rhodey says.

She's always liked Rhodey. He always treated her like an equal ever since she was a little, brutally shy kid. He never looked down on her because of her age. She figures that's why he became such good friends with a fifteen-year-old Tony while studying at MIT.

"Please...it's alright. You don't have to...you don't have to say it," she says, her voice barley a whisper.

"I'm sorry-"

"It's-"

"I wasn't talking about that, Erica. I'm apologizing for him-for Tony. I know he wasn't always the best dad, neither was his own father, but he cared for you. A lot. He just...he had odd ways of showing it," he says.

All of a sudden, it clicks. Her father is an only child, raised in a huge mansion, and from the lack of family photos other than newspaper clippings about Howard Stark's various achievements, his parents appear to have had minimal interaction with him. He would have learned at an early age how to entertain himself and rely only on himself. She tries to remember if Tony ever talked about his father to her.

She's shaken out of that thought when it dawns on her that Rhodey was using past tense to refer to Tony.

xxx

The weeks pass and Erica begins to count her father's name in the weekly reports of soldiers killed overseas. She's just becoming accustomed to the relentless sleep pattern-falling asleep and then waking up, writing a bit until she falls asleep on her notepad. When she wakes up her cheek is imprinted in ink and her eyes swollen from the tears. Putting an old washcloth over her eyes every morning becomes a daily routine until she gets a call from Rhodey. Not Pepper, but Rhodey. It's the first time he's called her since Tony went missing.

Erica finds herself at a point of nausea when she's waiting for Tony's plane. She's happy, _so_ happy, but she doesn't know what to expect when Tony gets home-if he gets home. _Will he be emaciated? Most likely dazed. Ill. Harboring post-traumatic stress disorder, without a doubt. _She's taking a mental tally of all the horrendous, but expected things her father could have while waiting in the car with Happy. She's jolted out of her trance-like state when someone wraps her into a tight hug.

It's Tony.

She can't breathe-her body coils up until every part is clinched. She's used to being touched by him, but they always seem meaningless. She leans into the hugs, as always, but she doesn't feel like he's truly giving them or she's receiving them. She doesn't want to receive the hugs. She guesses they're both just a little too confused, too cautious. He finally pulls back and gives her a smile-it's different this time. It's smaller-not the same shit-eating grin he flashes to the press or her. No, this time it's more reserved-it's almost pained. But for the first time, it's genuine.

After a handful of odd pit stops, including an In-and-Out Burger drive-thru, Pepper and Happy drop them off at the mansion. She tries not to stare at her father, examining the cuts and bruises on the patches of skin visible alone with the faint light coming from his chest. She figures she'll ask him in the morning, that is, if they can both get through the night. Her father's finally home, but she doesn't think she'll be able to get a night's rest without her mind swirling around the possible, hellish scenarios he was put through. Seeing him in the flesh doesn't serve as enough of a reminder that he survived it.

"I'm glad your home," she says timidly, turning to him as they eat Chinese takeout on the leather couch. She's in worn-out leggings and a T-shirt that's seen better years. Her father is in similar attire-sweatpants and a white shirt-with the exception of that old fashion robe he always wears. She assumes it was his father's.

"I'm glad I'm home, too, kiddo."

She stays up late with him watching shitty action movies. She must have fallen asleep on the couch because she wakes up at two in the morning with her arm half-asleep and a blanket draped over her. She smiles.

She stumbles down into the garage where she can see the light on. She sees him staring at his computers, studying something on the screen. She squints in order to get a better view but she's not wearing her glasses. There's something just so terribly sad about it-her father's first night home from three months of hell in captivity and he's staring at his computers, but then again, it's nothing different than the usual. She goes to bed soon after, but she wakes up an hour later to hear Tony screaming. She stays outside her bedroom and listens to him, but she's too afraid, she doesn't know what to do. This is her biological father screaming for his life in his own nightmares and she can barley walk down the hall towards his room to help him.

He's already back to work when she awakes again that morning.

xxx

He decides to show her the Arc Reactor the following week. She's been meaning to ask, but she couldn't bring herself to do it, and she doubts Tony would have been ready to confront her either. Even when he finally shows her the thing that's keeping him alive, she freezes. She's avoiding all eye contact with him when it dawns on her that that... electromagnet is bolted and screwed into his body. Bolted and Screwed.

It dawns on her that the night he came home from captivity, he wasn't looking at cars or designs of weapons on his computer. He finally got the chance to see with his own eyes just how deep this device penetrates his chest, which organs it has compromised and displaced. No wonder he looked so lost.

She's lost in her own thoughts when he mentions how the Arc Reactor was his father's greatest creation. She points out that he was the one who created it-not Howard-and she gets a genuine smile for the first time.


	2. II

From an early age, Erica learns that Obi, as she calls him, isn't just the controller of the company, but her father's own personal image. She doesn't know much about the situation regarding her grandparents' death, but she knows that Obi was the one who had to tell Tony about it.

The thing about Obi is that he's always been much more of a father to Erica than Tony ever has or ever will be. She figures that when he's called to the hospital that this father role is more of an obligation to the Stark name. It's an obligation that he certainly isn't fulfilling willingly, because there are very few people who would willingly assume responsibility for an infant that they didn't know existed until a month ago.

In a way, Obi's always been cleaning up her father's messes. She's only twelve year old when she figures that out. She can't but help read the various articles online about her father. They fall into two categories: those that sing his praise and those that are littered with photos of him with another blonde on his arm, the second always being a different from the first.

It's her father's relationships with women that force her to start thinking about her father's tendency to objectify people. Not just women, but people in general. She only sees the man during Christmas time and summer, which is usually when he jets off to Ibiza, so that's hardly enough time to make a sound judgment but Tony doesn't know how to form real relationships. Maybe she's being biased, but looking at her own failed relationship with her father, she can't help but realize he treats people like machines. Hell, he treats his machines more like people.

But being the unwanted daughter of a man with more money and burdens than he knows what to do with isn't going to translate to a close father-daughter relationship no matter how much she over-analyzes it. Still, she knows it starts somewhere. When she asked Obi about Maria and Howard, he never does anything but sing praises, but like those one-sided articles that were filtered through Stark Industries' PR System, she knows there's more to the story. It's not until Rhodey insinuates that Howard's parenting skills were worse than Tony's skills that she starts thinking about asking Obadiah again. She doesn't want to, but who else could she ask? Pepper? Tony tells Pepper a lot of things, but his childhood is his childhood. It's in his past, and who is Tony Stark to talk about anything but the future?

xxx

She goes back to school and comes back for Thanksgiving. It's a pointless return. Pepper's happy to see her, Erica's always pleased to see Happy, but Tony seems more distant if that was even possible. Still, the reactions are familiar and she takes comfort in that considering last time she came home her father was declared missing, most likely dead, and when he finally returned home he had a gaping hole in his chest.

On the night before Thanksgiving, it's one in the morning and she's looking through old photos of Howard and Maria online. It's sad she has to resort to using the Internet for this but she's either too afraid to ask Tony or too sure he's not going to have any photo that would make him an ounce of sentimental. In the photos, there are tons of Howard and Maria together at numerous banquets, but not one of Tony together with them. There are many photos of Tony with his mom, but none of him with his parents or Howard individually.

They're all posed. Fake. Forged bliss.

Maybe that's why her father doesn't know how to connect. He never really had a point of reference for relationships. And after spending the majority of her childhood being shipped off like cargo to a boarding school, maybe she doesn't know how relationships work either.

For the first time, she considers the possibility that maybe they're both at fault.

xxx

"It was just fate that you survived that…" Obadiah sneers as he pulls the reactor from Tony's chest.

It takes everything in Erica to not vomit during that point. She wants to get up; she doesn't know what she'll do or what she could even do, for that matter. But her father's heart is being literally ripped out before her eyes and she's huddled behind a couch.

"Your father, he helped give us the atomic bomb. Now what kind of world would it be today if he was as selfish as you?" Obadiah taunts.

Erica watches in silence as her father stares Obadiah down, powerless to do anything.

And she wonders how many times has Obie's played that card before? The "selfish" card, the "your father would have done it better," card. He's probably gotten that comment for years now whether it's in subtext or blatantly spoken.

But that's the thing; Obadiah basically is Tony's father, biological or not. Tony trusts him. Well, trusted. Tony trusted him and Obadiah played him like a fiddle. Obadiah spoke to Tony like a son or at least someone that was less calculating. Her father must have some kind of trust issues, but he always seemed to trust Obadiah. Now, she watches as Obadiah, her father's father figure friend, treat him like nothing more than an object in the end. Tony lays motionless, his skin so white that he looked like he was a ghost. He was literally dying before her eyes.

"You're not a child anymore, Erica. Stop hiding, I can see you from there," Obadiah says.

Erica freezes.

Obadiah grabs her by the hair like she was a child and throws her across the room. It's enough of a blow to knock her unconscious.

xxx

When Erica wakes up, the battle has been fought. All that's left is the methodic beeping of a heart-rate monitor. Her head is heavy and her eyelids feel like they're sewn shut. She moans, trying to stretch her toes and arms without the dull ache prevalent.

She opens her eyes and sees Pepper in the chair next to her. She can tell by the bags under Pepper eyes that she's tired, but not disheveled. She takes it as a sign that Tony is alive and breathing at the very least.

_Figures. It's always Pepper_, she thinks. It's an awful thing to think that she's disappointed that her father isn't there waiting for her to wake up when he's probably in a hospital bed of his own.

She focuses on the ceiling for a minute trying really hard not to cry. When tears start to brim her eyes she turns to her side so they can fall freely, but then she's shocked because Tony is sleeping, glass of scotch next to him on the table, in the hospital chair to the right of her bed.

He looks awful.

Her eyes go to the scotch glass first; because she worries he'll drink himself to death one day. Preoccupied with those thoughts, it is not until a few seconds later that she realizes his hand is holding hers. She squeezes faintly as if to say "thank you", but that wakes him up.

"Erica?" he asks, groggily.

"Water?" she asks and immediately hates herself for it. _Idiot_, she thinks. Her throat is burning but out of all the damn things she could say...she picks that one?

Tony lets out what can she can only describe as a grunt as he reaches for the glass of water sitting next to his scotch on the night-stand. _ It's probably Pepper's_, she figures.

Tony helps her sit up and take a sip. When she sits back, she's exhausted from the little physical activity. Tony is staring at her with an expression she's never seen in his eyes. His shoulders are slumped forward, his eyes are bloodshot, and he's fiddling with his hands, which he never does. This is a man who always knows how to fix things; Tony stark always knows what to do with his hands.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

She nods.

There's an awkward silence as times passes slowly. It isn't long before Pepper wakes up and hugs her. Erica leans into the hug, feeling equally as overwhelmed. When Pepper finally lets go, she's heading out of the room to get the nurse to check up on Erica.

She can't bring herself to look Tony straight in the eye, only allowing herself to steal short glances of him out of the corner of her eye. He looks absolutely wrecked.

"I'm sorry-" he says.

"For what?"

"For being a shit father for all these years," he says, sighing.

Silence.

"It's okay," she pauses. "I get it. You barley had a relationship with your own father, how could you have one with your daughter?"

"You can't really trust what you read on the Internet, can you?" he smirks.

"I can't...but you never talk about him or your mother, for that matter. I'm not an idiot," she says.

There's another pause before Pepper comes back in.

"Go back to bed, kiddo," Tony tells her and leans forward, planting a kiss on her head.


	3. III

Just when things begin to get better, they get worse. She doesn't exactly disapprove of Iron Man, but she worries. A lot. That's just in her nature. It's funny now; when she was a little kid she would read comics and think that having a father like Batman would be so cool.

She decides her five-year-old self was a fucking idiot.

Pepper somehow lets her go to Stark Expo even though she's supposed to be laying low, which Erica doesn't mind very much. She's been used to being an afterthought for a while now. She knows Pepper doesn't mean that when she says "laying low", but Erica's starting to think of it that way.

After what feels like the twentieth person she's bumped into, she finds one of the various monitors backstage to watch her father give the opening speech. He's just finishing up with his ridiculous entrance—as if women weren't already throwing themselves at him backstage—when she notices all the people in the crowd. Essentially, up until now, she always thought of her father's fame and fortune from an outsider's perspective. She shares half his blood and therefore, half his fortune, but she never _thought _about it. She didn't think she deserved it, in fact, she was dreading the day she would have to one day inherit it. However, when her father was playing God every night as Iron Man, she wonders how long it would be before he would arrive home too beaten and battered to run the company.

Money is an odd thing, filled with responsibilities she doesn't want to take on and alliances with those she never thought she'd have…essentially Tony's feelings regarding his own daughter.

xxx

Pepper (and Tony) pull her out of the boarding school after the incident with Obadiah. She figures their logic is odd considering the fact that the whole reason they put her there in the first place was to "keep her and her identity safe"—like Erica Parks and Erica Stark are two different things. She wore her family name proudly, but sometimes it felt too heavy. She wasn't born a Stark…by blood she was, but the truth of the matter is that it was bestowed upon her.

One day before Christmas, there's a leak. Erica notices from the window that there's more paparazzi out their house than usual. Her mind wanders to assessing what movie star her father brought home this time when she realizes that the paparazzi are pointing at her. She ducks her head under the windows, swearing under her breath.

She's never going to be Erica Parks again.

xxx

Although she's at home for the longest period of her life (_the joys of being homeschooled by an artificial intelligent PA system_, she muses), she rarely ever sees Tony. When she does, he's dashing back into his garage or Pepper is dragging him into the car as he's late for yet another meeting.

Sometimes she finds herself waiting at the bottom of the staircase for her father when he goes on a mission. It's childlish—she feels like she's a five-year-old girl waiting for her father—but yet she's afraid he won't come home.

When she's not studying, she spends the majority of the time on her computer. She's smart enough to know that the topic of his parents is off-limits. Even if she tells Pepper, the information will most likely be relayed to Tony. The search history is most likely being sent to Tony by JARVIS, but him finding out about her snooping around his family history is much better than having to ask about it face-to-face.

When she does finally work up the courage to do that, it's not long after she gets shot down.

"When your parents died, how did you deal with it?" she asks.

He turns around and stares at her for a second, doing a double-take. It's like he didn't even know she was there in the first place. She can see the shock in his eyes laced with hesitation.

"You…you should be going to bed, kiddo," he says, eyebrows itched together with awkwardness, not confusion. Erica rolls her eyes—she's not a kid. She knows that he's ignoring the question even when it's a question that he should be confronting, not running away from.

She's about to leave when she stops and says, "You know, I know what it's like, too."

"You didn't loose both parents, Erica," he says, a little too quickly and a little too forcefully.

"I practically did," she mumbles. She didn't mean for him to hear it.

Tony's face changes so quickly she thinks she's about to be hit, but then his hands falls lower to his side and his gaze turns to the window. She doesn't say anything as she leaves the room with her head tucked down and arms crossed across her chest as if to somehow protect herself.

xxx

"These are for you," Tony says to her the next day at breakfast. Her father is not the most confrontational person and frankly, neither is she. This isn't how she expected the issue to be resolved. The conversation—she wouldn't go as far as to call it a _fight_—from last night would go unmentioned and the two would go back to going out in public with painted smiles, coming home, and with each of them retreating to their safe havens. It was a routine—she would go to her room/library and he would sulk over to his garage.

When he gives her the little velvet box she doesn't know how to react. Her spoon falls limply into her cereal as she stares at the box with hesitation. She looks up at Tony for some sort of cue, but his face is just as hesitant as her face is.

Trembling hands crack open the box gingerly.

"They're, uh, yours," Tony says in a failed "this-is-my-attempt-to-be-tender" tone of voice as he crosses his arms.

"Thank you," she musters out.

xxx

Tony's being bombarded with the daily laundry list of things that need to be done, people that need to be called, and the people he needs to care about when Erica catches him staring at her as he grabs the box of Coca-Puffs from her.

"You're not wearing the earrings," he says to her, almost as an offside. She looks up and just like that, he's off to the car with Pepper.

_Why does he care? _she thinks.

The gift wasn't different than the others he showered her with over the years with each one being more expensive than the next. She hated the fact that since she was a teenager now, he would give her jewelry. Jewelry that looked all too like the meaningless earrings, bracelets, and necklaces he would give to the women he brings home. But they weren't at the same time—they were elegant and timeless.

She decides to wear them the next day. Tony realizes it and cracks a grin at her for what feels like the first time in a year. After dinner, when she's taking the plates out of the dishwasher—a habit she has kept over the years to keep up a small sense of normalcy—he goes up to her and tells her he's glad she likes_ her _present.

It's only a few days later that she realizes they're Maria Stark's earrings.

The next day, Tony takes her out to eat at a nearby diner. As odd as it seems, this is her favorite thing to do—well, out of the few things they have done together—with Tony. The diners are always dingy family diners on the outskirts of Malibu. Mexican food is her favorite so he takes her to get dollar tacos. She knows it's odd to others—if she was the daughter of a billionaire, then why the hell were they sitting on the hood of his Ferrari eating Mexican take-out? The answer is clear to her—these few trips are the trips that are most precious to her. He couldn't take her out to a fancy place without the press noticing so he settles on these hole-in-the-wall places, which she's fine with. She didn't grow up here—she wouldn't know what to do at a swanky, five-star hotel bar.

While she's chewing a mouthful of her chicken taco, he tells her that his father was borderline abusive. It's not much, but it's the first time he comes out and admits it. She freezes and lets him go on, not knowing what to say.

He tells her that he loves her, but that's all. Not much. Nothing more. He doesn't elaborate, but with the genuine way, almost pained way he says it, she'll take it.


End file.
